Looking from within: Comparing first-person approaches to studying experience

• Published in: Current psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.) Vol. 42; no. 12; pp. 10437 - 10453
• Main Authors: Lumma, Anna-Lena, Weger, Ulrich
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01-04-2023; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Behavioral Science and Psychology; Comparative analysis; Methods; Psychological research; Psychology; Social Sciences; Surveys; Germany; Phenomenology; First-person methods; Introspection; Subjective experiences; Qualitative inquiry
• ISSN: 1046-1310; 1936-4733
• DOI: 10.1007/s12144-021-02277-3

Fostering our understanding of how humans behave, feel and think is a fundamental goal of psychological research. Widely used methods in psychological research are self-report and behavioral measures which require an experimenter to collect data from another person. By comparison, first-person measures that assess more subtle facets of subjective experiences, are less widely used. Without integrating such more subtle first-person measures, however, fundamental aspects of psychological phenomena remain inaccessible to psychological theorizing. To explore the value and potential contribution of first-person methods, the current article aims to provide an overview over already established first-person methods and compare them on relevant dimensions. Based on these results, researchers can select suitable first-person methods to study different facets of subjective experiences. Overall, the investigation of psychological phenomena from a first-person perspective can complement and enrich existing research from a third-person perspective.